Results tagged “clubbedthumb”

READING: Olympia Dukakis, who you know from such films as Moonstruck and Steel Magnolias, will be at Barnes & Noble tonight. She'll be reading from a brand spakin' new edition of Bertolt Brecht’s play Mother Courage and Her Children. She recently put down the Oscar and picked up a pen to write the forward to the antiwar classic.

THEATER: The Ohio Theater is the site of two of summer's best play festivals, and the first, Clubbed Thumb's eleventh Summerworks, started yesterday with Anne Washburn's I Have Loved Strangers, "in which true prophets, false prophets, and non-prophets battle for the salvation of ancient New York." On the company's website http://www.clubbedthumb.org/ you can do some "research" before going, via various eyebrow-raising links; or you can just rely on the winning trifecta of excellent track records: of the Ohio, of Clubbed Thumb, and of Washburn herself, whose play Apparition recently showed to well-deserved acclaim. Over the next weeks, two other plays will be in the festival -- Erin Courtney's Alice the Magnet, and Rachel Hoeffel's Quail -- but each is showing for only a few days, so get under the thumb while you can. - Mallory Jensen

The Phantom of the Opera may be nearing the ripe old age of 18, but most shows in this city don’t even play 18 shows. That doesn’t mean that they’re unworthy, of course – far from it, at least in our book. For instance, there’s Clubbed Thumb’s new production What Then, which (including previews last weekend) has 16 showings at the Ohio Theatre. Written by Rinne Groff and directed by Hal Brooks, who recently got accolades for his work on Thom Paine, this is the story of a dysfunctional family and their attempts to stitch their relationships and psyches back not through therapy but rather through creating and exploring new realities through dreams and drugs. It’s a powerful vision that will leave you questioning your own perception of existence.

It’s not summer yet (as the stupid weather of the past few days has pointedly reminded us) but Clubbed Thumb is getting a jump on the season and its glut of festivals by staging its own while there’s a relative lull. On Sunday, Gothamist attended the opening of the company’s tenth Summerworks festival, which features three plays, and if 100 Aspects of the Moon was any indication, this anniversary year is one you definitely shouldn’t miss. Clubbed Thumb also has an annual “boot camp” in which it workshops new plays, and this first play of the three in Summerworks 2005 was boot-camped last November.